There are infinite ways to get stuff done. Drawing a circle in Adobe Illustrator can be done in under a second — but you can also spend three hours on it. For most simple things that you create, there is a very predictable, perhaps even “best” approach. But as tasks and projects get more complex — even a little — more and more options to achieve your goal present themselves, forcing you to choose one path over the other. Shocker: you are probably making bad choices all the time. These choices may seem harmless, but they are slowing you down, cluttering your process, and hurting both your profitability and creativity as a result. In other words: you could be delivering better work in less time, earning a bigger paycheck.

Hello, abstractions

Almost every second wasted in professional creation can be attributed to flawed processes: wrong steps are taken at the wrong time. This is why “winging it” is not a sustainable approach. Every commissioned creation consists of multiple predefined, immutable layers one must go through. I’m not talking Photoshop or Illustrator layers. I’m talking abstractions. Understanding and applying abstractions consistently is key to becoming more productive and successful as a creator. They help you maneuver the seemingly random creative process in a surprisingly structural way. Abstractions can best be visualized as a ladder. The goal? You guessed it: to climb the ladder, bottom to top.

That’s the ladder. Quite simple. The tragedy often called ‘reality’ is that many clients (and some creators, too) want to start at step 4 and skip all the rest. After all, that’s where the fun starts, and that’s where things become relatable. Colors! Shiny stuff! Trends and buzz-words! Sadly, many designers go along with it because we think,… well, what do we think? At times, not so much, it seems. Before we know it, we’re having three-hour meetings on typography and what stock photos to use, and how the competitor’s stuff looks, and the lord-of-RGB-knows-what — without anyone in the room knowing what the hell we’re trying to achieve in the first place. I’ve been there, and I know you have, too.

Whenever you find yourself discussing minor details with clients, and nobody knows which way to go: you’ve skipped steps. Painful as it may be (especially budget-wise), often, the best thing is to rip off the band-aid and start all the way back at step 1.

1. Define your goal

The only question that matters at the start is: Why?. Always ask your client why they want to do what they say they want to do. You will be surprised at how many clients can’t properly answer this. Yes, even big shot clients with a fancy marketing team (we love those) often struggle to define the goals of their actions. Apparently, nobody on their team had the guts to ask such a simple yet profound question. Everyone just assumed there was a clearly defined goal, somewhere in an Excel sheet, perhaps.

• You want a new website? Sure. Why, though?
• You want to post more on social media? Sounds interesting. May I ask why?
• You want a company theme song? That’s really cool. I hate to ask, but why, exactly?
• You want to print flyers. What do you hope to achieve with them?
• An international billboard campaign? We can do that. But, before we begin… just one question.

The answer to this question (in the form of a clearly defined goal) will help you make both big and small choices down the road. More importantly, however, it will help you substantiate your choices to the client. You can say: “It’s red because it helps achieve the goal we all agreed on.”

A good answer would be: “We want to attract more clients in geographic area Y between the ages of Z and A.” A bad answer would be something vague like “We want to be more visible online” or “We want 10k followers on Instagram before August” because that still doesn’t explain why the client wants that. It provides cues nor boundaries for creative decision-making.

Ultimately, you will be referring to this answer during the entire process to prevent the team from continuously cascading into endless discussions about minor details. Every detail serves the goal. The goal is the answer.

2. Choose your medium

Wait, what? Doesn’t a project inquiry involve the medium already? “We want a website,” “We want a theme song.” Yes, more often than not, project requests include the medium. But it shouldn’t be that way. You can pick the perfect medium to achieve your goal after defining it, not before.

Say you want to travel from A to B. It makes a lot more sense to define points A and B on a map before you decide whether you’re going by foot, airplane, or boat.

This means you could lose some new business. If you only make websites, and it turns out your client needs a video instead of a website to achieve their goals, well — you’re out of luck. Perhaps consider broadening your services or forge allegiances with other creatives and work with kickback fees.

In addition, some clients had gone through the due diligence internally and have clearly defined a goal before they reached out. In this case: sure, it’s fine to move forward, as steps 1 and 2 have been checked off in the correct order.

3. Articulate

After you know the goal of your creation and you’ve picked the perfect carrier for your story, it’s time to write it. Every creation tells a story, no matter how small or how big it is. A misconception about “stories” is to think of them as narratives: this happened, and then that, and then he died. Not every story is a narrative. When we talk about the story a creation tells, it’s best to think of it as an implicit message conveyed by the creation, rather than an explicit narrative being told in a chronological sense.

Every choice you make during your design process adds to the story. Beware that the things you leave out say just as much (or more) as the things you include. Leave too many things out, and you may send a message of carelessness and come off cheap. Add too many things, and you may overcomplicate your story, making it hard for people to understand what’s going on. The goal is to align the story you tell to the goal you’ve articulated earlier.

Write the story without thinking about shape or other presentational aspects — but within the boundaries of the medium, of course. It should be purely textual. You should be able to tell it over the phone. Keeping it textual forces you to focus on what you are saying and prevents you from masking flaws with cosmetics. The story should be as concise as possible.

4. Materialize

Finally: shape, color, motion, typography, photography… The fun stuff. Now is the time to translate the story you want to tell to a “thing” that does this most effectively and efficiently.

Apple products (and packaging) make a great example, partly because so many people know them, but also because no detail has gone untouched. The design of the sturdy, white cardboard boxes that most Apple products come in leaves nothing to chance. Their texture, the way they slowly open, their finish, even the satisfying sounds they make when handled… But also their simplicity and the subtle yet deliberate absence of technical specs printed on the box: all of it was designed to enforce the story of luxury, attention to detail, refinement, and class. Before you’ve even held the product in your hand, you have already been primed to believe that it must be a very high-quality, well-engineered product.

Apple’s story is materialized perfectly in everything they do (their packaging, website, Apple Stores — everything). Beware, though, that a cheap product in a not-so-fancy package sold from a shabby store can also be an example of a perfectly materialized story. The design choices made should reinforce the story being told — whatever that story is. This applies to cheap brands, hyper-modern brands, old-school brands, eco-friendly brands… it applies to every brand and all of their products.

Endnote: don’t confuse abstractions for phases

Although every abstraction translates to a phase of the design process, the entire process is at times (much) more comprehensive. Especially for bigger projects, the four steps outlined in this article can be preceded by orientational phases or “discovery” phases, which can help predefine goals and articulate desires. After the fourth abstraction (materialize), it’s a good idea to implement some form of quality assurance. And then, at any time during the process, there may be testing, prototyping, legal due diligence — all the stuff that we don’t love but sometimes have to do.